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I have been considering James Dobson’s recent announcement that Donald Trump is now a Christian. Certain segments of the evangelical right seem to think that this is a mark of his suitability for the Presidency. Leaving this aside for now, I find myself burdened with a thought. What if he really is? What if he really has given his life to Christ? This train of thought (certainly hypothetical, and I think an unlikely fact) led me to write the following letter.

Mr. Trump

You’ve never heard of me, and you likely never will. I am nobody; an unskilled factory worker from Ohio, with no credentials to my name, no accomplishments to speak of, and of little repute. I do not say what I am about to say because I think I have some special wisdom to offer, or some argument that will change your world. I doubt you will ever see this, and if you do, I have nothing but hope and faith to assure me that it will reach you. Nonetheless, on the millionth millionth chance this reaches you, and the millionth further chance that you are truly facing the decision I hope and pray you’re facing, I have chosen to write to you as though I am truly addressing you. Rest assured, I would say every single word to your face and quite a few more besides.

I speak not with my own authority (I have none), or my own wisdom (I have even less of that), but I present to you the Word of God. May I be forever accursed if I misrepresent even a single thing.

I am so glad to see you come to Christ, and I bitterly repent my initial scoffing. I rejoice along with the angels in Heaven if you have truly come to Him. Stranger things have happened, and He is wondrously strange. He can call anyone to follow Him, and in His wisdom, He can show anyone their need for His grace.

I have a warning for you, however. You. Must. Repent. You must be broken by the weight of your sins, and understand the horrific price He paid for YOU.

“But I have” I hear you protest.

No. You haven’t. You cling to worldly power and wealth, the things that made you who you are. Do you understand that you’re a caricature of the bad guy to most people? I can’t even take you seriously. And you think THAT is Christlike behavior? Your sin is on display before the entire world – you CANNOT simply claim the Name of Christ and imagine that the whole game is over.

Here’s where we get down to the nitty-gritty. There are two types of Christians out there – those who call themselves Christians, and those who are Christians. In a world where claiming to be a Christian is fairly normal, it costs nothing to claim you’re a Christian. Many of the “Christians” you hear people complaining about aren’t actually Christians at all. You cannot just say some prayer like an incantation and magically get to be a Christian. God changes you. He does it in both drastic and subtle ways, but He does not leave you the way you are when you come to Him. He destroys EVERYTHING that is not from Him. The Bible is quite clear on that. It is similarly clear on the merits of wealth and worldly power. They mean NOTHING, and they consume you. Your pursuit of worldly gain has turned you into a hollow shell, an automaton mouthing the most provocative thing he can think of for a momentary cheer from an audience of hollow automata. And you act like it has meaning. You act like it matters. Nothing. Matters. But. Christ. Not to the believer, it doesn’t.

He becomes your all in all, and replaces your heart of sin with a heart for Him. He renews you, and gives you new life, restoring you for a new role in His Kingdom.

This means Christ’s character becomes evident in you (and oh, what a glorious thing it is). Do what Christ did. Don’t just vaguely follow his teachings, and sorta-kinda tag along with some vague morality tales remembered from Saturday morning cartoons. Really look for yourself. Read the Bible. Start with Romans, or if that’s too dense (and it IS dense), Mark. Let the thirst for the Word carry you onward to new understanding and new depth of faith every day.

“Well, the Bible…”

No. Stop. If you claim to be a Christian, you accept the Bible as the Word of God. This does not mean slavish imitation of every various Old Testament story, or endorsing a literal 144-hour period of creation, or anything so silly, but it does mean trying to understand it. The Bible is a deep and complex document that does not submit to naive interpretations (such as the unfortunate literalism that is so often found in today’s churches), or to cursory skimming (such as the cherry-picking you find men like Creflo Dollar or Joel Osteen doing). It holds together remarkably well, however, when you read it like a grown-up. Read the Word for what it is, read it trying to understand what the author meant, rather than what it looks like he meant. It’s deeper than it looks (although the genealogies are generally fairly skippable), once you begin to let go of your own prejudices.

Understand this; you are wretched, Mr. Trump. Until you understand that, until you accept that your worldly power, your wealth and leverage, your cheering crowds mean less than nothing in the eyes of God and in the light of eternity, you cannot truly repent. Take heart, however – you’re not alone. We’re all wretched, we’re all worms, not ONE of us has the slightest good thing to hold up to God to say “Here, look at my righteousness.” He gives us goodness. He gives us righteousness. He covers over our sin and brokenness with His own blood, and brings us to rest in Him.

If you truly are my brother (and a lump rises in my throat and tears stand in my eyes at the thought that you might be), if you truly have become born again, then set aside your grasping, set aside your seeking after glory, and follow Him. Walk away from your treasures; sell all you have and give it to the poor. He will provide – your new family will provide. I don’t have much, but what I have is yours if you will only repent.

I like so-called contemporary worship styles, generally. I enjoy an enthusiastically strummed acoustic guitar as much as the next guy, and quite a bit more than some. I’ve even been known to keep my snarky remarks about the worship leader wearing his girlfriend’s pants mostly to myself, no matter how probable it seems. I like the style.

But I also like to sing. I know, I know, bizarre notion, enjoying singing along, but I do. Here’s the problem, and it seems to be almost exclusively a problem of contemporary worship services – I can’t, a lot of the time. I’m somewhere in the baritone/bass range, and I’m not an especially skilled singer, both situations exacerbated by a number of years of smoking. I can carry a tune, but I’m no soloist. In short, I’m a pretty typical churchgoer, as far as my singing ability goes. And I simply can’t sing along to a lot of contemporary worship services. I’ve seen a few worship services in my life (admittedly, not as many as an adult as I saw as a child, but still quite a few), and it seems more and more that the music isn’t intended to be accompanied by the congregation. It’s a performance.

Whether it’s because of modulating into a key that is intended only for operatic sopranos and certain varieties of dog whistles, or unexpected complex melodies that take unusual turns (I’m looking at you, David Crowder Band), choices of song that challenge the congregation’s singing abilities are neutral at best, but seem far more likely to be a distraction. The classic hymns are songs of doctrine, of instruction, and of prayer, and they’re intended to be easy to remember, and yes, easy to sing. Isaac Watts wrote many of his hymns in ballad meter, without tunes designated. Have you ever sung Amazing Grace to the tune of the theme to Gilligan’s Island? Same idea – the tune wasn’t the point. The lyrics were.

Now, honestly, there’s nothing wrong with performance. There’s certainly joy, and I’d even argue that there’s merit in stretching your capabilities. If you’re a singer with a five octave range, by all means, use it. Use it to the glory of God. But if you do, let that be your whole purpose. Don’t play “worship leader” and modulate the song up three times just because you can. The congregation will become the audience halfway through. If you go up in front of an audience to perform, to demonstrate a gift that you have, and you bring some portion of them to worship, awesome. If, on the other hand, you are planning to lead songs of prayer and thanksgiving and adoration, and you are planning to minister to a congregation, why would you do something which accomplishes nothing except to jar some portion of the congregation out of that state and to bring attention onto you?

Again, I want to say that I ENJOY this sort of music. In the following video, Steve Green modulates out of my physical capabilities after the second verse (and from note 1 is already singing in a range that I have no business attempting). This is probably my favorite rendition of this classic hymn. And it’s unsingable, for me.

There’s nothing wrong with performing an unsingable song. There is definitely something wrong with using an opportunity to lead congregational worship to perform. I’ve been guilty of it in the past, although thankfully very few people notice the antics of a bass guitarist, except perhaps other bassists.

I speak of this as though it is an intentional choice, and as though conscious pursuit of attention is the sole motivator for choosing such songs. This is deliberate, and also incorrect. I understand that a worship leader might choose a song that is difficult to sing because it is relevant to the service, or because it’s part of a set that works particularly well, or any of a hundred excellent reasons. I do not deny that there may well be quite legitimate reasons to have a song with which some part of the congregation cannot sing along in the service. I would just caution all worship leaders to be intentional and careful in their choices of songs. You may be professional (or at least, professional quality) performers, and it may feel as though you’re never stretching your performance ability in the weekly service. For the people that you’re leading, however, this might be the only time this week that they have sung. This might be the only time in their LIVES that they sing for fifteen minutes straight. Why do you expect us to be capable of following along with a trained voice?

While it may be that familiarity is the reason that I think that O God Our Help in Ages Past is far more singable than O Praise Him, as one friend suggested, I think that there are some fairly objective ways to examine singability. For example; I picked up a hymnal while I was working on this article, and you know, the overwhelming majority of songs are verse-refrain, or simply verse. This is not to say that I suggest only playing old songs, mind you, but I do suggest avoiding POP songs. A pop song is written with lots of melodic changes, and will probably be pitched too high – for whatever reason, the trend these days favors that.

I suppose that the likely fear is one of irrelevance – it’s awfully hard to force one’s listeners to downshift from the constant stimulation of contemporary music into the stately, almost staid world of the classic hymnody. This is not an invalid fear – there is much to be said for keeping one’s instruction tools relevant to the culture, and I’d be the first to admit that an enthusiastically overwrought organ performance of How Deep the Father’s Love for Us is one of the more effective soporifics on the planet, when delivered by your average church organists. It’s an invalid dichotomy, though.

God With Us or Grace Like Rain or The Power of the Cross or 10,000 Reasons, or any of a dozen others offer contemporary musical style, but they feel more like hymns. And this brings me (finally) to my point – there’s a LOT of good stuff that’s eminently singable out there in the contemporary Christian market. Music leaders need to spend time listening to music critically – don’t ask “do I like this?” or “does this interest me?” but “is this saying true things?” and “can the congregation sing this?”

I wish I had more answers than simply just noodling around, but really, that’s what I’ve got. I’m not a music leader, and I haven’t been a performer for some years, so any solutions I offer would likely miss something. I think, however, that this is one of the major failings of the contemporary church. We either cling with manic determination to a worship style that belongs to a prior century, or we throw ourselves into the dopamine-rush world of pop music, playing the pop game ten years behind the pop world.

This may not seem like much to you, but the PPG was a gift to me many years ago, and it’s followed me through quite a number of kitchens. And now that I’m in a confined living space, I was becoming nervous that I was going to have to put it someplace inconvenient. This whole thing is an exercise in organization. Complicated organization. I’m going to have to become quite a bit neater. This is not a bad thing, of course.

I’m a bit more than a week into living in a camper, and it is strangely liberating. I find myself looking at duplicate items – for instance, I brought a double-arm corkscrew AND a corkscrew/bottle opener thing – and thinking how silly it is to have redundancy. Goodwill shall be getting a box. Everything becomes a necessity, but the definition of necessity is a bit changed. Multiple backup light sources ARE a necessity when power isn’t a certainty, but multiple ways to open a bottle of wine are not. It’s fun finding out how little stuff one actually needs. Now, I’m still not fully in the camper – I don’t have water, propane, or full electricity. With nothing but an extension cord, I have a laptop and means to charge various electronics. It’s a workspace and a sleep space for now, but it will be livable soon.

I apologize for the brief and autobiographical nature of this post – I haven’t been doing much beyond simple existence-type things for the past week or so, so that’s really all I have to write about. This will change.

Warning; I get personal here. This was hard to write, and if you’re reading this, I obviously chose to publish it. Be assured – publication was not a forgone conclusion when I began to write, and at a certain point (the point at which I’m writing this disclaimer), I was not entirely sure that I wasn’t just going to delete the entire thing. Read with caution.

There are two ways of approaching a problem in this world – God’s way, and the world’s way. To the seasoned believer this will be obvious, but non-trivially true. To the maturing believer, this will be somewhere between obvious and trite, with a side of fatuous thrown in, depending on their maturity level. To the nonbeliever, this will sound like religious mumbo-jumbo. (Bad news for my non-Christian readers – the level of mumbo-jumbo in this blog is only going to be increasing.)

There’s a fourth category, however, that I did not address above. To the carnal believer, this statement will be obvious, but trivially true.

Now, I use the term “trivial” here in a specific sense – in mathematics, trivial solutions are those solutions which have very simple structures. Without getting too far into the detail of why, trivial solutions to a problem are generally not useful in understanding the problem – while it is true that the definition of a circle (with apologies to any real mathematicians who might be reading; the set of all points [P] that are in the same plane and a specific distance r from a defined point) is satisfied by a single point (which means that r is 0), it doesn’t tell us anything about what a circle is.

Confused yet? No? Okay, cool – we’re about to add more to the mix. Glad you can handle it.

I’m not going to get into the reasons why, or the various issues surrounding it, but through a series of choices that seemed like a good idea at the time, willful blindness, and a heaping dose of self-deception, I’ve found myself at 31 with a gigantic collection of issues in my head revolving around sex and relationships, despite having a truly minuscule quantity of either in my past. It’s interesting to look at them through a lens of trust (shush. You know who you are), because where once (very recently) I would have said that they were essentially a giant undifferentiated mass of betrayals, deceptions on all sides, self-destructive patterns, etc., I can now point to specific breakpoints, specific things that I did wrong.

Every time I mention any of these things, I am given two forms of advice. From the one side; “Go out, have fun, meet people, get laid, demystify the whole thing, let yourself heal!” From the other; “Wait. Be patient. Guard your heart.” From the one side, a pattern that I know will lead to some sort of healing – given the nature of these issues, a lot of them would quickly be resolved by a bit of demystification. From the other, a pattern that reeks of Josh Harris and Rebecca St. James, and mostly makes me want to break things.

The fascinating part about the first piece of advice is that I have gotten it from believers MORE than the second piece of advice, especially as I have gotten older. There are times it’s tempting – times when I find myself considering the nature of grace, and what healing (even on worldly terms) might mean in my life…

All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful, but not all things edify.Let no one seek his own good, but that of hisneighbor.

1 Corinthians 10:23-24 (NASB) (biblegateway.com)

Awesome! All things are lawful! Where’s that phone number?

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?

Romans 6:1-2 (NASB) (biblegateway.com)

I use the NASB translation above, but in the title of my post I use the wording from the English Standard Version. When Paul asks if we should continue in sin that grace may abound, he is not just referring to the twisted logic that if a little grace is good, a lot of grace must be better. He’s referring to the thing that is at the core of many of the struggles believers (me most DEFINITELY included) seem to be having these days.

The evangelical church does an outstanding job preparing her children to live in a world populated only by the evangelical church. The blindfolds and fetters that are placed around many youth in the church often serve to do little more than increase their vulnerability to the blandishments of the world. The church says “thou shalt not”, and assumes that people will simply comply, regardless of the cost to themselves.

Obviously, most people don’t comply. I haven’t, certainly not in any sort of detail. Others have complied less. In a world where one is being told that it is good and right to reach out and pluck a fruit, and one can see the ease and seeming harmlessness of doing so, it is a REALLY dumb idea to simply tell people “no”, without ever telling them the why, or offering an alternative. And we wonder why our buildings are emptying.

I won’t rehash the splendid logic of Romans here, but the only conclusion that I can draw is that choosing expediency is the exact opposite of the choice to which we are intended to come.

If we are indeed to be salt and light to the earth, how then can we so enthusiastically adopt it’s patterns? Why do we behave as though the Church is nothing but a social club for Sunday mornings? Martyn Lloyd-Jones said “When the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it. It is then that the world is forced to listen to her message, though it may hate it at first.”

If I choose the route of healing that is the one recommended by the world, simply because it IS the one recommended by the world, I have decided that the promises of Scripture are nothing but wind. If I place my trust in my own understanding and in the solutions whose results I can see and understand, what meaning can God’s way have to me?

I don’t know if, when, or how God intends my personal issues to be healed, but I do know this – I shall not reject His promises in favor of expediency. I don’t have to understand it. I don’t have to see the end of the road. I don’t even particularly have to like it. I just have to do it.

A couple of weeks ago, I said that I was confident that for the first time in my life, I could lose any possession, and react in trust. Yesterday, the Lord saw fit to put that to the test.

For reasons that I am not prepared to go into (and may never be, in public), I have found myself with a six month suspension of driving privileges. This one is different from the last, though – less than 24 hours after I was railing at God, begging Him to understand WHY He took away the greatest worldly joy in my life, I find myself in a state of calm trust.

and you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons,

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,Norfaint when you are reproved by Him;For thosewhom the Lord loves He disciplines,And He scourges every son whom He receives.”

It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons

Hebrews 12:4-8, NASB (biblegateway.com)

My mother reminded me of this passage when I was complaining about my suspension yesterday. I really don’t have anything to add, save that it is truly humbling to be reminded that I MUST see myself as a child on a daily basis. Without the trust of a child towards his father, how could I embrace the discipline that is given me?

Okay, this must simply sound like I’ve lost my mind. That’s okay, incidentally – if you’re not prepared to accept that I can be genuinely grateful for this, and GENUINELY trust (and I really can’t tell you how cool that part is) that this is what I need, this next part is going to sound REALLY nuts.

A few weeks ago, I was given a specific instruction about my personal behavior. There was a pattern I had adopted, and I was led, quite forcefully, to stop it. Naturally, being the obedient and trusting son I am, I complied without question, qualm, or hesitation.

If you believe that last sentence, I have some farmland in Arizona to sell you. Prime corn country.

In typical fashion, I dug in my heels, declared “NO! This isn’t that big a deal!” and carried on as before. Rather than abandon me to my rebellion, God took me by the scruff of the neck, rubbed my nose in the mess on the carpet, and informed me in no uncertain terms that He meant what He had said. The fascinating part (to me, at least) is how very quickly this has turned from discipline to instruction. I exhort you, brethren – do not leave the instruction of God aside. Not only is it easier to obey, prompt obedience and acceptance of discipline puts you in the right place to learn some lessons the easy way.

I was reading Charles Spurgeon this morning (always a worthwhile endeavor), and I was humbled by how I have been spared the more destructive kinds of excess (which is not to say I’ve been a paragon of moderation – far from it, in fact), despite my enthusiastic courting of… well, look at a list of “don’ts” in the Bible. Pick any list, it doesn’t matter which one. I’ll wait. If you’re having trouble coming up with a list, let’s go all the way back to the basics.

Then God spoke all these words, saying,

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

“You shall have no other gods before Me.

“You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God,visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me,but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.

“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not[d]leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain.

“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.Six days you shall labor and do all your work,but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you.For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you.

“You shall not murder.

“You shall not commit adultery.

“You shall not steal.

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

Exodus 20:1-17, NASB (biblegateway.com)

I have deliberately and in full knowledge and disobedience (that is to say – after my conversion) sought to do at least half of these things, and despite the great specificity of some such lists (after all, they’re exemplary and not exhaustive) I am reasonably sure that that statement is true of ALL of them. God has seen fit to throw barriers in my path at every turn, preventing my rebellion despite my petulant demands that I be permitted to do what I want. For that, I am finally grateful. Maybe I’ll manage to grow spiritually without metaphorically feeling like I spent six months of my life in a washing machine full of rocks, this time.

The title of this piece is the only relation it has to Edwards’ sermon, incidentally – I’ve not even read the text of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (an oversight I intend to correct… when my reading list opens up). I just couldn’t resist the parallel title structure.

I’ve become one of those guys. You know the ones – the guys who can only talk about their cars, or their guns, or whatever their personal flavor of obsession is. One of those guys whose identity, strangely, seems to revolve around a Thing. And I think I’m cool with it.

I bought a Jeep Wrangler recently. Ain’t she purty?

I swear, I had a good reason to take a random picture of my jeep. I was giving a friend a hard time about the weather – he’s from the frozen north, where apparently there are still mammoths roaming around from January.

Yeah, she’s a bit beat up, and yeah, there are some mechanical issues, but what you have to understand is that she’s the first vehicle I’ve ever really taken any pride in. Until fairly recently in my life, I was really, really bad at being in the world. I was thoroughly of the world, however. Astute readers will note that there is a problem with that particular combination. She taught me how to see it.

And now we divert for some vague theoretical bloviating! You knew what you were getting into when you clicked the link.

As I’ve found myself growing more attached to Isabel (by now you may have guessed that Isabel is, in fact, a jeep), I’ve grown a bit worried, from time to time. Historically, possessions have had very little hold on me in one sense, while mattering very, very deeply in another. At one point in my life, it would be quite accurate to say that nothing, individually and as such, mattered in particular to me. It could most accurately be described, I think, as a sort of bland apathy towards any specific item. On the other hand, I had a certain dragonish possessiveness about me – these things are MINE. All of the impotent greed of Smaug or Eustace, without the core of real desire that they had. Mine was like an emulation of desire, being masked by an emulation of a lack of desire. I was an automaton pretending to be a dragon pretending (very badly) to be an ascetic.

Then I bought a vehicle that was, admittedly, an impulse buy. In high school, a good friend of mine had a jeep, and I had always wanted one. By the time I got home from picking her up (a story in itself), I was in love.

As the first flickers of real attachment started to show up in my mind when I thought about my vehicle (this was about halfway back home from purchasing her), they were immediately followed by a stab of what can only be described as terror. You have to understand – one of my most insidiously deceptive habits of thought is to model God like I do anyone else. That is not to say that I attempt to predict His actions or anything so silly, but I try to come to some sort of understanding of Him which allows me to actually think about His relationship to reality, not just to some fuzzy sort of feelgood universe inside my head. So even though I consciously try not to be so presumptuous as to say to myself “God would want….” in any given case, I occasionally find myself doing so. Here’s the hazard of that – you begin to apply human patterns to it. In my case, those human patterns are the patterns of logic, specifically of formal logic. So I had and have a tendency to think of God in extremes. My first thought, the one that caused that stab of terror, was “If I get attached to this, God will take it away.” I wouldn’t have said that I thought of God as malicious, but it’s possible that capricious would be pretty close.

I don’t know what it is about that drive, but that moment of terror (I think it’s that moment, at least – there are a few other candidates) began a process that I have generally described as a phase change.

When he hits the bottles, he is creating nucleation sites – places for the water to start to change into ice. If the water is cold enough (and it’s more complicated than just “cool to zero C”, but that’s pretty close,) a single nucleation site is all it takes to start a chain reaction that engulfs the bottle in moments. That is a phase change.

Whatever moment began it, all I know is that before it, I saw God as being a capricious master, who knows best but only by definition. In daily life, your actual happiness is more or less irrelevant. After the phase change, I learned how to trust.

After that moment where I looked at my life and at God and could only come to a place of fear, I began to consider life, and how it has all worked together. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that everything has come out for the best, but that’s because I don’t know what the best of all possible worlds is. Honestly, I’ve only just begun to learn to trust God – an epiphany and a few months of thought do not a saint make, but for the first time in my life, I know what it actually MEANS to trust God. That trust is immensely liberating. Now, when I consider possessions (even Isabel, though I have no hesitation in saying that she is precious to me,) I know I can let go. There would probably be… distress associated with letting go of a few things, but I know I could, and I could do so in full faith that my needs will be provided for. This is not, of course, the moment of testing, but I’m more sure than ever that I could withstand the test.

And now we’re coming full circle – as I began to understand how to trust God for material things (and yes, it really did take me this long in my life. I’m not very bright sometimes) I began (quite rapidly) to trust Him for immaterial things. I began to understand that I could enjoy the world He has given us, without anchoring myself in it. I began to understand… a lot of stuff that would mostly come off as either mystical or obvious, depending on where you stand. In short, I learned how to tell the difference between “in the world” and “of it”.

I realize that I’ve just spent two posts in a row talking about my feelings. I promise that we’re going to be getting back to subjects that actually affect the real world soon, but bear with me a bit further – I still have a story or two to share about the jeep that changed my life.

So, yeah, I talk about my jeep a lot. Sure, it was God who taught me the lesson, but in His infinite grace, He decided to use a 99 TJ to do the last part. For that I’m grateful – He could have given me this epiphany with an El Camino.